And, here’s the real kicker: they discovered this bit of evidence after two questionable things happened. (1) Warner/Chappell Music (who claims to hold the copyright for the publishing, if it exists) suddenly “found” a bunch of relevant documents that it was supposed to hand over in discovery last year, but didn’t until just a few weeks ago, and (2) a rather important bit of information in one of those new documents was somewhat bizarrely “blurred out.” This led the plaintiffs go searching for the original, and discover that it undermines Warner Music’s arguments, to the point of showing that the company was almost certainly misleading the court. Furthermore, it definitively shows that the work was and is in the public domain.

Allegedly, the song brought Warner/Chappell up to $2 million a year. It might actually have been cheaper to license the Beatles’ “Birthday” from the White Album — once, anyway.

In trying to complete the transaction, I was told that they were very busy and that my wait would be up to 40 minutes for them to show up.

This is the second time in a week (Vegas was the first) that I have had to spend some serious wait-time just because the local government has decided to artificially limit competition and capacity. I am sure the politicians would tell me it’s for my own good, though.

As do all politicians. I think it’s in the paperwork they have to sign to be eligible for graft.

Setting the temperature to suit men is wrong in ways that go far beyond summer fashion.

Frozen workers make more errors and are less productive, according to Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell’s Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory, who studied office temperatures about a decade ago.

I suppose there’s some vaguely egalitarian idea behind having everyone sweat, but scratch any totalitarian, and you’ll find a whole bucket full of vaguely egalitarian ideas.

[D]oes anyone else find it ironic that feminists are accusing men of secretly stacking the deck against women in order to get them to … put on more clothes? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume that men would more likely crank up the heat to get women to strip down? First step: set thermostat to 91 degrees. Second step: pitch “Casual Bra and Panty Friday.”

Third step: exile all these freezing women to somewhere deep in the heart of Texas. On a day like, oh, the 28th of July.

An effort to recapitalise the Northrop Grumman E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) with a modern business jet is shaping up to be this summer’s blockbuster defence programme, with three solid industry teams now vying for the $6.5 billion prize and Raytheon working on a curious new airborne radar called “Skynet.”

Skynet? Seriously?

Raytheon is flying under the radar, so to speak, by offering its new “Skynet” radar to all sides. The company is in a non-exclusive partnership with Lockheed, but says it will offer its radar — believed to be a 16ft derivative of the Advanced Airborne Sensor (AAS) carried on the Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft — to whichever company wants it.

According to Raytheon: “Skynet incorporates the latest innovations developed for the US Navy’s stringent, wide-area surveillance requirements [and] meets or exceeds all JSTARS requirements for the lowest possible cost.”

Lockheed confirmed in a statement that it intends to carry Skynet on its business jet design, describing the radar as a “state-of-the-art active electronically scanned array (AESA), long-range, ground-surveillance radar.”

Northrop says it is closely examining Raytheon’s radar offering, but could also choose its own ground-looking AESA radar, depending on the final JSTARS requirements. Metzger’s team has been conducting trials with several different radar types at its radar test facility in Melbourne.

There’s a certain irony in writing this while a Heat Advisory is boiling away outside, but what the hell:

Look, warm is better than cold. Plants grow better. Food is more abundant. Plus being cold sucks, just ask anyone who has not yet moved south for the winter. I say we fire up those coal plants, drive the heck out of your SUVs, bring back Freon. Each of us should strive to have a carbon footprint the size of Bigfoot. We all know what happens if it gets too cold.

I figure carbon-based life forms with a morbid fear of carbon are sufficiently self-loathing to make themselves perfect candidates for Voluntary Human Extinction.

Debra Baum, 53, entered a plea of no contest to one count of operating an advance fee talent service. Judge Deborah Brazil sentenced Baum to 36 months summary probation and ordered her to serve 45 days in jail or perform 20 days of community labor. Baum also agreed to pay $91,252.75 in restitution to the parents of the victims…

The City Attorney’s office said that Baum solicited a 19-year old in 2012 who she heard singing in a hair salon and signed her to a $10,000 per month management contract to promote her vocal career. Before terminating the contract in September 2012, the victim’s family paid $70,000 in management fees to Baum as well as thousands of dollars in third party expenses for vocal training, stylists and recordings.

Iran’s profit-maximizing strategy requires the price of oil to go up or, failing that, for Iran to leave its oil in the ground until it is able to produce oil at a lower cost.

That in turn leads to two observations. First, if Iran sells oil at all it means that it’s absolutely desperate for foreign exchange. And, more disquietingly, expect Iran to foment instability in the Middle East. Stability is bad for business.

Avoiding kale, if not exactly a priority, has certainly been a factor on my task list, on the sensible basis that “flavorful,” that popular foodie term, does not, I believe, necessarily imply that the flavor in question is at all desirable.

[A]lt-medicine researcher and molecular biologist Ernie Hubbard … began to notice an odd trend among some of his clinic’s clients in California’s Marin County, a place known for its organic farms, health-food stores, and yoga studios. Extremely health-conscious people were coming into to complain of “persistent but elusive problems”: “Chronic fatigue. Skin and hair issues. Arrhythmias and other neurological disorders. Foggy thinking. Gluten sensitivity and other digestive troubles. Sometimes even the possibility of Lyme Disease.”

And he found, in the form of this 2006 peer-reviewed paper by Czech researchers, evidence that kale is really good at taking up thallium from soil. The paper concluded that kale’s ability to accumulate soil-borne thallium is “very high and can be a serious danger for food chains.” And here’s a peer-reviewed 2013 paper from Chinese researchers finding similar results with green cabbage; a 2015 Chinese study finding green cabbage is so good at extracting thallium from soil that it can be used for “phytoremediation” — i.e., purifying soil of a toxin — and a 2001 one from a New Zealand team finding formidable thallium-scrounging powers in three other members of the brassica family: watercress, radishes, and turnips.

Excuse me while I smile at “thallium-scrounging powers.”

Up until about the early 1970s, you could buy thallium sulfate at your local hardware store: it made a good rat poison. Turns out, of course, that it can poison lots of critters besides rats. Still, it’s not like the whole earth is just saturated with the stuff; while thallium is not exactly rare as elements go, the most common sources are industrial. One of those industries, however, is big in these parts: oil drilling.

A woman is in a coma after her butt implants exploded while doing squats at a gym. Serena Beuford, 27, was working out for an Instagram video when she heard a loud pop. Soon after, she fell to the floor screaming in agony … saying that her butt was gone.

According to Beuford’s sister Jackie, Serena had visited an unlicensed clinic to get a 64-inch bottom. She said her sister wanted to become famous on Instagram.

The huge NSA data collection center at St Louis will be totally breached, and all of the information will be released into the open. The US economy will be thrown into a deep depression as credit availability evaporates overnight due to lack of confidentiality.

Obama will propose microchip implantation as the solution, which will be agreed to by both parties, with the exception of 2016 hopeful Mike Huckabee, who sees this as the “mark of the beast.”

Expect Mitch McConnell to offer token resistance at first, because that’s what he does best: token resistance.

Airport (the 1970 movie) portrayed air travel as it was back then; glamorous, bordering on exotic … a thing the hoi polloi could only dream of doing. Okay, put aside the part where the crazy guy exploded a bomb on the plane; that’s not my point. Back then, stewardii were all hot babes, your knees were not serving as backstops for the seat back in front of you, your seatmate was not wearing a Dumb and Dumber tanktop, carrying on luggage was considered tres gauche, and you were served food, on plates with silverware no less. As everyone knows, it’s not like that anymore.

I always spelled it “stewardae,” but then I was somewhat perverse in that era, and besides, I never actually got on a plane until 1972. After that, though, I logged some ridiculous number of miles in the next three years. (Somewhere in the low five digits, anyway.)

Airlines have become the Greyhound bus of the 21st century … and I am not saying that in a pejorative way. Yes, the relative luxury of air travel 40 years ago is gone and we can bemoan that. However, air travel today is fast, relatively inexpensive, and reasonably convenient. The price we have paid is being packed in so tightly with our fellow passengers that, if we were pigs headed for the slaughter house, there would be animal cruelty ordinances to prevent it. The animal analogy is a good one and, again, I am not being pejorative. Realistically, the only way airlines can move millions of people and their stuff around every day is to treat them like cattle. It works.

About three years ago, Airbus floated the idea of offering airlines a choice between narrow and really narrow seats. (The merely narrow seats were dubbed “XL,” which proves that even sadists have a sense of humor.)

After 8 incredible years, I am stepping down from being CEO of Cheezburger today.

I will remain a Board member. Cheezburger’s President and COO, Scott Moore will step in to the CEO role with my full support. Scott has proven to be a skilled operator and a steadfast leader. He has taught me a lot about being strategic, decisive, and positive. He has taught me that I have much to learn, and I am grateful for his dedication to Cheezburger. I will miss working with him daily.

Not that he regrets a minute of lolcattitude:

Cheezburger gave rise to a new category of content, a new industry of global reach, and as some would call it: the downfall of civilization. I say, ‾\_(ツ)_/‾ bring it on, because it looks like a lot of fun.

Woot yesterday was selling a home security system, festooned with no fewer than four video cameras, and this was their pitch:

Big Brother is absolutely watching. You might as well stop fighting it and just watch him right back.

Look, that Orwellian nightmare has come and gone. We’re in a place Georgie-boy never even DREAMED about. Privacy is gone, and we gave it up willingly for likes and stars and upvotes. So why fight it? This is the world we want! Get some cameras and join in!

With a security system, you’ll be able to see the world around you. Your friends, when they’re line-of-sight. Your family, when they wander around the yard. Total strangers, when they walk within range. It’s the very same power every government has, only on a smaller scale. Why, with a little practice, maybe you can even zoom in and read the paper over your spouses’ shoulder!

Don’t be afraid of Big Brother. Be his ally! Lament the privacy that’s now long gone by treating yourself to a nice security system and become part of the system. It’s not so bad, as long as you stay out of Room 101.

This is of course snark, as Woot cranks out for every product it sells, but that one line in the second paragraph is just a hair chilling: “Privacy is gone, and we gave it up willingly for likes and stars and upvotes.” Now you know what we truly value.

Wang Kaiyu … owns a banana farm in Jinchang Town, near the border of Vietnam, China News reports. Two years ago, a Vietnamese man was passing by the area with two “good looking” pups, and Wang decided to buy them off the man, he told reporters.

For two years, he lovingly raised the “dogs”, bathing and pampering them every day. Wang said the animals were well-behaved but that their appetites were rapidly growing. He recalled a few times when his beloved pets caught and ate chickens on the farm.

As fate would have it, Wang saw a poster about wildlife protection at an exhibition hosted by the forest police, and the bells started ringing.

Yvette Nichols had appealed an October decision [pdf] by the state licensing agency for teachers — the Board of Examiners — suspending her teaching certificate for a year for posting a screenshot on Facebook of an assignment a student had completed, which instructed students to “practice writing my name the kindergarten way.” Nichols’ Facebook post, however, focused on the curse word in the student’s name.

What is this story missing? Right:

The decision does not specify what the student’s name was, or what curse word it contained.

Theoretically, I suppose, the child could have been named for a marginally famous river, like the Washita.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Sealed Air, the maker of bubble wrap, has announced a new “flat” version of its product. This version, to the lament of many on social media, will not pop.

Sealed Air states that shipping pre-inflated rolls of bubble wrap takes up too much space in trucks and on warehouse floors. The new version is sold in flat sheets and will be filled on demand with a custom pump. Shipping it in this manner will use about 1/50 as much space as before.

Rather than individual bubbles, the new wrap contains a single chamber of air which holds little promise to entertain like the original wrapping has done for decades.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on — what’s the term this week? Oh, yeah, “marriage equality” — one guy got totally bent out of shape and complained to his local NBC affiliate:

The “colors of gays”?

NBC has been, um, proud as a peacock since 1956, when the bird (called by NBC insiders “the bird”) was introduced with the express intention of helping then-parent RCA sell color TV sets. The current version dates to 1986; KARK-TV Little Rock has been an NBC affiliate ever since signing on in 1954.

I have to believe that station staffers, finding this silliness on their Facebook page, guffawed for several minutes, and then one of them quit laughing and posted a completely deadpan, perfectly accurate response:

Ordinarily, I’m a big believer in individual privacy and I don’t like the idea of extensive and intrusive surveillance. But a program called Churchix uses facial recognition software to see who did and didn’t show up at service last Sunday, and I must confess I am intrigued.

“We didn’t have any intention to get into the church market, but orders started piling up. In a really short period time, we got emails and phone calls from about 10 churches and they all asked us for the same thing, and now we’ve had even more requests.”

Honeywell made the high-tech thermostat we have in our house. It has wifi, can be programmed on a computer to dates and times. It’s pretty neat.

When you get that high-tech, though, you have to worry about things like software and firmware upgrades. It has sent me three emails informing me that I need to upgrade the software. And in none of those emails has it explained to me how. A quick surfing of the control panel has come up with nothing.

In other news, our power has gone out three times in the last 24 hours.

A Florida wasp provided the latest challenge to Allegiant Air in a difficult month for the airline, crawling into an aircraft sensor Thursday and forcing a flight departing St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport to make an unscheduled landing.

Allegiant spokeswoman Jessica Wheeler said Flight 894 with 159 passengers took off at 7:30 a.m. headed to Niagara Falls, N.Y., but diverted to Orlando Sanford International Airport not long after takeoff because of problems with the sensor.

A retired pilot from some other airline speculated as to what Allegiant meant by “sensor”:

Former U.S. Airways pilot John Cox, who lives in St. Petersburg, said from the airline’s description it appears the wasp was in a pitot tube, which is as narrow as a pencil, on the nose of the aircraft. The plane, a McDonnell Douglas model, has three such tubes measuring airspeed.

Cox said the pilot of Flight 894 may have noticed one of three gauges showed a different airspeed than the other two during the flight, indicating a problem.

“It’s not an uncommon occurrence,” Cox said. The wasps “find a spot on the inside of the tube that they like and they will start building a nest and it impedes the airflow into the tube.”

Passengers will be given a $50 voucher toward future travel on Allegiant.

Spanish police have arrested a Venezuelan veterinarian wanted by the US for allegedly trafficking heroin by implanting it in puppies.

Andres Lopez Elorza was arrested on Saturday in the northwestern town of Santa Comba, where he had been hiding after the National Court authorized his extradition last month, a Civil Guard spokesman on Tuesday said.

So simple. Seal it in a bag, seal the bag under the dog’s fur. (What’s the next step beyond the death penalty?)

Police said Colombian authorities discovered 6.6 lb of heroin implanted in three puppies during a 2005 raid on a clinic the vet ran in Medellín.

The statement said the vet was a member of drug-trafficking gang that used dogs to send liquid heroin from Colombia to the United States.

Superglue is the kind of thing you see on the impulse buy rack while you’re patiently waiting in line at Walmars and silently judging the fashion choices of the landwhale in front of you and taking stealthy pictures with your cell phone, or you would if you could just for fuck’s sake remember to silence the little picture-taking noise so we don’t have yet ANOTHER incident. Then you get the superglue home and you carefully open it to glue that ceramic ostrich’s beak back on, and by the time you get your fingers unstuck from each other, the superglue has turned to granite inside the tiny tiny oh so tiny tube. So you never already HAVE superglue. You have to go get it.

To verify this, I went to yon Junk Drawer and extracted my precious bottle of superglue. The contents were seemingly as dense as osmium and about as permeable. I think I’d used it — wait a minute, has anyone in the history of the world ever managed to get two uses out of a single bottle?

Motor Trend, a magazine over 60 years old, sells about twice as many copies as Automobile, a magazine just turned thirty which became a corporate sister to MT a couple years back, and more recently a live-in relative: both magazines work out of the same office in El Segundo, because, you know, synergies.

MT, despite its senior status, is apparently not considered the flagship of the line. The most recent subscription offer was 2 years of MT for $24, two years of Automobile for $30, though MT has the higher single-copy price: $5.99 versus $4.99. “Official” subscription rates, as hidden away in the magazines: MT, $18/year; Automobile, $19.94 a year.

Meanwhile in Ann Arbor, Car and Driver and Road & Track have different, um, issues: both sell for $4.99 on the stands, but R&T puts out only 10 issues per year. Hearst Magazines tends to fuzz up the rates by offering to throw in something else — in my case, usually Esquire — for next to nothing.

I learned that per capita, an average shower delivers 2-5 gallons of water A MINUTE. How many of us take 10, 15, even 20 minute showers, everyday? We use 25-40 gallons of water PER LOAD when we do the laundry. We are so ridiculously blessed to have clean water that appears at our command. For the past 24 hours, I’ve been obsessed with the following questions: Can you imagine hauling water from the creek like our ancestors did? What about third world countries in 2015, where women hike for MILES to deliver dirty water to their families … several times every day? I wonder how much water you could live on, if its price was comparable to gold?

My typical shower is down around three minutes. Then again, I do a lot more wash than some of you might imagine. Still, I keep the monthly usage down around 3,000 gallons, which is on the low side for Oklahoma City water customers but which nonetheless remains around 100 gallons a day.

Is it fair to mention that she thought of this while the plumbers were working on a broken water pipe?